Do-It-Yourself Usability Testing

Every day we create products for users and make decisions on how our users will use these products. However, we really are not our users and our wrong decisions as to what product users need and how they want to use it may cost us money, extra development work at later stages, and – of course – customer dissatisfaction.
When my team is working on a new product – we do not want to rely on our assumptions about users. We want to see our users in action to be able to reflect on what we need to change to make our product more usable. The testing is always a great experience, however very often the results are surprising: how come the users do not know how to use this button? It’s obvious, right? It turns out that it may not be so obvious after all.
People in many organizations or teams do not perform any usability testing as they believe such tests are time-consuming, expensive, and hard to do. Also, they believe they do not have the expertise they need. What I want share with you is a simple D-I-Y approach to usability testing to show you that every team can and should do it, as even a small round of testing provides insights that will help you significantly improve your product’s UX.

7PM | 15 March 2016

Artefakt Cafe, Dajwor 3 | KRAKOW

Annna Tutak

Anna is a user experience researcher and designer at Motorola Solutions. Her approach is based on the User Centered Design methodology. She loves challenging development assumptions, and when she overhears you saying things like “this is what our users want” be sure that she’ll swoop in and ask “how do you know?” She has worked with internal Motorola Solutions products such as portals, reporting dashboards and user documentation, and she has experience in every stage of the process – from research and ideation, through design and testing, to implementation.
When not geeking over UX stuff, Anna enjoys snowboarding, rollerblading, playing music, and baking cookies.